The foregoing posts are based on the 1982 pamphlet entitled Inside The Featherbed File ~ Canada’s Watergate — The Story of Treason in Ottawa by Patrick Walsh, former RCMP special operations undercover agent.

It was his home-town publication, The Gazette, which pinpointed how secret Orders-in-Council were used by Trudeau to ensure that the new Prime Minister Joe Clark would be bamboozled into an agreement whereby the hitherto unpublished portions of the Gouzenko report as well as the subsequent Featherbed File remained sealed for at least 20 years.

Following, are excerpts from a report published in the Oct. 11, 1979 issue of The Montreal Gazette:

In a secret Order-in-Council issued in his last days as Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau ordered all the police intelligence files on him and his Cabinet colleagues be sealed for at least 20 years, The Gazette has learned.

The files were part of a top-secret investigation called “Operation Featherbed” that was started by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the early 1960s . . .

Prime Minister Joe Clark agreed in a letter dated June 2 that Trudeau’s final Order-in-Council would be respected, an undertaking which has angered some Conservative MPs …

Repeated efforts by Trudeau and other senior Liberals to gain access to the Featherbed files were turned down by the RCMP security branch. But senior members of the security service have told the Gazette that the file includes material on the private lives of influential Canadian figures, their past political affiliations, contacts with agents of foreign powers, private weaknesses or vices and even sexual practices.

Trudeau’s decision to issue an Order-in-Council sealing this Featherbed material just four days after the last federal election, but while he was still Prime Minister, also brought sharp rebukes from his former Cabinet colleagues…

There was such an uproar from backbenchers in the short-lived Clark government over this “Operation Cover-Up” that pressure from the grassroots finally forced PM Joe Clark to make an amazing statement concerning the suppressed Featherbed File.

The following excerpts are from a Toronto Star report, Dec. 1, 1979:

The Prime Minister (Clark) said he has no intention of ever making the (Featherbed) file public. “Were we to publish that, we would be giving credence to gossip that affects people, some of whom are still in Ottawa …” he told a news conference.

Clark’s blunt remarks conflict with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and back-bench MPs in his own party who maintain the files show direct links between government officials and the Communist party.

Several MPs in the last month have demanded the government review the Taschereau Papers, secret records of a Royal Commission investigation of the 1946 Igor Gouzenko spy case, and check out reports that a “fifth man” in the Anthony Blunt Soviet spy ring in Britain was Canadian.

Accusations also surfaced in Parliament this week that Jean-Louis Gagnon, a member of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, was connected with subversive groups…”

The Sunday Star (Toronto), June 7, 1981, published a significant story by reporter John Picton. The first part of his report confirmed much of the Ottawa-based treason I have already mentioned, and then continued:

Lawrence also told the Sunday Star about the time he says he was asked not to check the Trudeau files.

He said he was approached “early on in the game” (meaning Clark’s term of office) by a man who’d been appointed as custodian of Trudeau’s cabinet documents.

Under a so-called “convention,” leaders of incoming governments traditionally have signed an agreement not to delve into cabinet papers of an outgoing administration.

Tory leader Joe Clark signed such an agreement — drawn up by Trudeau’s office — the night before he was sworn in as prime minister.

Before signing, Clark wanted to consult Lawrence since he was appointing him solicitor-general, but couldn’t find him. (“I don’t know why he couldn’t find me.”)

Some Tory MPs — Lawrence among them — think that was a mistake because the agreement, they allege, went much farther than any previous pact and effectively locked away many more papers than just cabinet documents.

“They related to security questions about Trudeau himself in his younger days,” when Trudeau was a world traveller.

The custodian — named by Lawrence but unavailable for comment — “was obviously perturbed about the availability to me of these documents, and he indicated to me it would be a blow below the belt if I started looking at those.”

Lawrence wouldn’t say if he did look at them.

… Cossitt (the Tory MP) also says that one of Trudeau’s last acts as prime minister in 1979, before handing over office to Clark, was to sign an order-in-council preventing the McDonald commission into RCMP wrongdoing from seeing certain cabinet documents without his permission.

The agreement Clark signed ensured that the order would stand.

But, says Lawrence, that agreement covered far more than cabinet documents. As solicitor-general he’d tried to see documents relating to the 35-year-old Gouzenko spy case dealing with a Soviet espionage ring.

Civil servants wouldn’t show them to him because of a previous order from Trudeau’s office.

When Lawrence asked officials why certain “security breaches” weren’t prosecuted, he was told that was the policy of the day. The reasons for that policy were locked away in cabinet papers.

I was given reports on what happened, but not on the reasons for the government decisions on why they didn’t prosecute. Canadian governments have hushed up all sorts of things.

Lawrence added:

One of the weird aspects of this is that we can see more about our affairs in other countries than we can see in Canada…

So much for the Star’s report. It confirms three decades of warnings by Canadian Intelligence publications that treason has been riding high in Ottawa; and it also confirms the fact that Joe Clark was so politically immature that Old Machiavelli, before handing over the keys to him for a brief interlude in 1979, tricked young Joe into actually covering up the Featherbed File scandal and thus unwittingly becoming himself a party to treason.

And, as Mr. Lawrence implies, it was the civil servants, still under the former PM’s ‘orders,’ who called the tune, not the ministers in the Clark Government!

By far the most serious coup administered against freedom in Canada was the seizure of control of the federal Liberal Party by Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his leftist clique in 1968. Since Trudeau seized the levers of federal power Canada has been politically, constitutionally, and now economically in turmoil and disintegration. Language problems have been exacerbated, regional issues have been aggravated and the feeling of alienation and separation has spread across this country. And, of course, in foreign policy, Trudeau has shifted us onto the side of Castro and close to the Soviet Union. Forget the possibility of ‘revolution’ in our country. In Canada, the revolution was!

Now, this should not be too surprising to Canadians if they really knew the background of their Prime Minister. This background was carefully researched, documented, and published in the March 1968 issue of The Canadian Intelligence Service — before Mr. Trudeau was even leader of the Liberal Party. While this revelation evoked in lib-left circles a great deal of teeth-gnashing, superficial denials, and smear against the Service and its publisher, the background documentation has never been refuted, and today may be found even in Hansard. Following, are excerpts from that original report:

1940: “Booted out of the Canadian Officer Training Corps (COTC) during the War for lack of discipline.” (Toronto Star, Mar. 3, 1968)

1941: Associated with anti-War and Red-supported Bloc Populaire in undermining war effort.

1945: Enrolled at Harvard, spawning ground of leftist intellectuals.

1947: Attended London School of Economics. Told Norman DePoe that Prof. Harold Laski, the Marxist, was “the most stimulating and powerful influence he has encountered.” (Weekend Magazine No. 13, 1966)

1950: Was in Shanghai when the Communists took over, and became a rabid admirer of Mao Tse-tung and his Red regime.

1951: Back in Montreal, he launched the leftist publication Cité Libre. Among the well-known Reds who collaborated, we note: Prof. Raymond Boyer (convicted of Soviet espionage in the Gouzenko Case); Stanley B. Ryerson, leading theoretician of the Communist Party and editor of Marxist Review; Pierre Gelinas, Quebec director of Agitation & Propaganda (“Agitprop”) of the Communist Party.

1952: Led delegation of Communists to the Moscow Economic Conference.

1953: Barred entry into the USA as an “inadmissible” person.

1955: Launched Le Rassemblement, a leftist “united front” rally in Quebec, but the CCF refused to join because it was too leftist.

1960: Led a Communist delegation to Peking for Red victory celebration.

1961: Social Purpose for Canada, the socialist handbook written by Marxist and NDP leaders, was published, containing a chapter by Mr. Trudeau in which he lauds Mao Tse-tung, urges socialists not to “water down” their socialism but to make its approach more “flexible,” and to welcome federalism “as a valuable tool which permits dynamic parties to plant socialist governments in certain provinces, from which the seed of radicalism can slowly spread.”

1962: Amidst protests, this millionaire leftist succeeded in gaining appointment as a professor at University of Montreal, which became a pro-Castro stronghold. Appointed to executive of Red-line Canadian Peace Research institute.

1963: Campaigned with NDP against Liberals, whom he called “idiots” because they had decided to accept nuclear defence weapons.

1965: Having decided to use the Liberal Party as an instrument to propel himself to political power, he and leftists Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier became ‘Liberals’ and were elected to Parliament, where they formed the “New Guard” of the Liberal Party.

1966: Appointed Parliamentary Secretary to P.M. Lester Pearson.

1967: Named Minister of Justice. Credited in Communist press with intervening personally to reinstate hippie rag Georgia Straight, which had been banned by Vancouver Mayor Campbell for obscenity.

To the left of Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau is the report of the Reds’ International Economic Conference held in Moscow in 1952. To the right is the part of that report listing Canadian delegates. Former Communist Marcus Hancock has testified that the Canadian delegation, headed by Trudeau, was organized by Canada’s Communist Party, which paid the delegates’ bills. Hancock, himself a delegate, says everyone he knew in the delegation was a Party member.

Introduced bill to legalize abortion and homosexuality, spearheading drive to shift Canadian justice from Scriptural to Humanistic basis.

Within 24 months of wresting control of the federal Liberal Party, our new Fabian-Socialist* Prime Minister had already begun to surreptitiously change the course of our country. Ottawa columnist Lubor Zink, in his May 25, 1971 column, let the cat out of the bag when he wrote:

Two years ago, discussing his operation of the ship of state, Prime Minister Trudeau told an interviewer: ‘One has to be in the wheelhouse to see what shifts are taking place. I know that we have spun the wheel and I know that the rudder is beginning to press against the waves and the sea . . . but perhaps the observer, who is on the deck and smoking his pipe, or drinking his tea, sees the horizon much in the same direction and doesn’t realize it, but perhaps he will find himself disembarking at a different island than the one he thought he was sailing for.

So steadily, but gradually, in the best Fabian style, did the Prime Minister spin the wheel and change our course, that an examination of our Canada just 13 years later reveals staggering evidence of an incredible revolutionary change.

But let us examine a few more aspects of national security and the cover-up of subversion under the Trudeau regime.

One incident stands out vividly in my mind which gives an insight into the secret of Gagnon’s success as a Communist infiltrator. In 1952 I was returning from a meeting of the National Committee of the Canadian Peace Congress in Toronto, and met Gagnon in the diner of the train going to Quebec City. The diner was practically deserted and we could talk freely. Somehow the converstion turned to the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers affair — and, of course, Gagnon did not know that he was speaking to an RCMP Special Branch undercover agent. In his eyes I was one of the outstanding Communist fellow-travelers in Canada. He understood the fact that I was not, like him, a card-carrying member only because of tactical considerations. Consequently, he had no need to guard his words with me. “Hiss made one big mistake, Pat,” he confided as he looked around the diner, “and that mistake was when he sued Chambers for libel.”

A few years later Gagnon was to prove that he would not make a similar mistake. When I publicly called him a Communist in 1956 and produced a photostat of a letter of his which he had once written to me, showing beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was a Communist, he refused to be goaded on to sue me for libel — although he did bluff a libel suit on a few prominent politicians who had repeated my statements. But, significantly, when the time for the trials came along Mr. Gagnon failed to show up and the suits were dismissed. He knew only too well that I could easily prove he had been, and was still, a Communist.

A number of Liberals were disturbed by the references in the press to his Communist record. As the Quebec Liberal Party was trying to recoup its lost political prestige, and Gagnon was the virtual head of the Provincial Liberal publicity department, many sincere anti-Communist Liberals were convinced that he was more of a liability than an asset to the Liberal cause. Some of the more outspoken Liberals were always urging Gagnon to sue newspapers for libel whenever any reference to his Communist past or to his participation in the Gouzenko affair was mentioned.

But Jean-Louis Gagnon knew all the details of two of the most famous trials of recent history: the libel suit of Oscar Wilde against Lord Queensbury (in which Queensbury turned the defence into a prosecution which led to Wilde’s imprisonment), and the Hiss-Chambers trial (in which Chambers was instrumental in turning his defence into a prosecution which led to Hiss’ imprisonment for perjury). Somehow these two trials had become an obsession with Gagnon! And, on the other hand, he was not the only ‘Liberal’ involved, and the same situation that existed in Democratic circles in the USA was being paralleled in Canada. As Chambers said in his book, Witness (page 473):

Every move against the Communists was felt by the liberals as a move against themselves. If only for the sake of their public health record, the liberals, to protect their power, must seek as long as possible to conceal from themselves and everybody else the fact that the Government had been Communist-penetrated.

To get back to our conversation in the diner in 1952, Gagnon stated that he was “better protected” than even Alger Hiss, who even after conviction enjoyed the support of the Secretary of State and Supreme Court Justices! After a furtive look-around, Gagnon exultingly whispered across the dinner table, “What I have more than Alger Hiss had to protect me from exposure is the fact that I did work for British Intelligence at one time.” Obviously he thought that nobody could ever believe he had been a Communist because of the fact that he had worked for British Intelligence during the war.

The mere fact that Gagnon was first recommended to the British Foreign Office by Donald Maclean (the Soviet agent in the British Foreign Office who later fled to the Soviet Union) is rather significant. And the fact that whilst in London and other cities he seemed more interested in looking up Soviet contacts than in carrying out the work he was paid for (radio programs for the BBC, British double-checking of North African ‘contacts,’ etc.) was one of the reasons the British Intelligence dropped him like a hot potato. His pro-Soviet past was even too unsavoury for the French in North Africa, and neither he nor his wife was allowed to stay in Algiers after the Allied landings.

Whilst this writer was working for the RCMP Special Branch, he continually received specific instructions to supply as much information as possible on Gagnon’s underground Communist activities; and the late Superintendent, John Leopold, expressed disgust when the name of Jean-Louis Gagnon was ‘omitted’ from the final report of the Royal Commission pursuant to the Gouzenko revelations. In one of the Gouzenko documents it was plainly indicated that Jean-Louis Gagnon had supplied the ‘D-Day’ date [June 5th-6th] to Colonel Zabotin after Gagnon had received this information from the famous ‘missing papers.’. . .

So much for the excerpts from my report published in that 1960 CIS issue. Following, are extracts from a most revealing letter (original in French) which Gagnon wrote to me in 1940:

I haven’t got a drop of national glory in my veins, but I have a lot of hot red blood that demands vengeance …

“I believe that revolt is the law of the slave, and one must die according to his law — but I do not believe anymore that there are races that are born to reign or to dominate…

“Nationalism leads to useless wars; class struggle leads to the liberation of the oppressed… the class struggle is a liberating factor…

“I believe that we will find ourselves, inevitably, on the same side of the barricades; because, first of all I believe that one day there will be barricades, and finally because I believe that lead [bullets], fire and blood will suffice to ensure our agreement… ”

Should any reader still doubt the incredible pro-Red background of Mr. Gagnon, who has held so many top posts under the Pearson and Trudeau ‘Liberal’ regimes, I invite a close examination of the following photographic reproductions:

At the left is a photographic reproduction of a 1943 flier, promoting a Communist Youth Convention at which the featured speakers were none other than Jean-Louis Gagnon and Fred Rose, the Communist MP and Soviet spy.

Immediately below is a reproduction from an issue of the Communist organ, La Victoire, in which Jean-Louis Gagnon honours this Red publication. Two other ‘leading citizens’ who similarly ‘honoured’ this Red organ were Fred Rose and Bob Haddow, both notorious Red leaders.

NOTE: Over the years, both The Canadian Intelligence Service and On Target have published many reports on this incredible Gagnon case, giving more details and documentation. Several of these articles and reports have been gathered together and are available in a “packet” for $2. Order from: Canadian Intelligence Publications, Box 130, Flesherton, Ontario NOC 1EO.

In the Hansard report at the right, MP Dufresne is asking PM St. Laurent: “Is the Prime Minister aware that a radio commentator and newspaperman by the name of Jean-Louis Gagnon, who has been closely associated with Fred Rose and other well known Canadian Communist leaders, is presently one of the main publicity agents of the Liberal Party in Quebec, and chief editor of the party’s official publication in that province?”

When we come to the Trudeau era it is significant that the ongoing “useful tradition of collegiality” referred to previously by Prof. Granatstein, by which the top mandarins in the civil service were switched around like musical chairs, accelerated rather than diminished. This not only applied to the members of Privy Council but to the Crown corporations as well. A typical case is that of Jean-Louis Gagnon, a long-time personal friend of the Trudeau-Marchand-Pelletier triumvirate.

Jean-Louis Gagnon’s long pro-Soviet record has been the subject of many questions in the House of Commons over the years. Yet Gagnon has been appointed repeatedly to top-level positions such as Co-Chairman of the Bilingual and Biculturalism Commission, Director of the ill-fated information Canada, Ambassador to UNESCO, and finally Commissioner of the Canadian Radio & Television Commission (CRTC). On November 26,1979, John Gamble, M.P. (North York) asked these questions in the Commons (see Hansard, Nov. 26, 1979):

Mr. John Gamble [York North]: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Secretary of State and Minister of Communications. Is the Secretary of State and Minister of Communications aware that a certain Jean-Louis Gagnon, as a member of the CRTC, was observed while in Paris by the French security forces in the company of a known KGB agent who was apprehended transmitting missile secrets to the U.S.S.R.?

Is he further aware that the said Jean-Louis Gagnon was a card-carrying member of the communist party and, if aware of these circumstances, does he consider it appropriate that this gentleman, occupying this sensitive position moulding communications policy, should retain his present position?

Hon. David MacDonald (Secretary of State and Minister of Communications): Mr. Speaker, I should point out that it is not as Secretary of State, but as Minister of Communications that I will be responsible for questions related to Mr. Gagnon. Accusations similar to what the hon. member has said have been made before. As I understand it, there is nothing in Mr. Gagnon’s career that would make him ineligible to serve on the CRTC. Indeed, he has given outstanding service on that body.

The Canadian Intelligence Service, in a special Supplement to its June 1960 issue, published a report I had prepared, carefully documenting this incredible case of Jean-Louis Gagnon. Following are excerpts:

Communist background and activities

I first met Gagnon in 1935 when we were both in the Valcartier Camp Unemployed Project. Gagnon was a member of the Young Communist League at that time, and had been sent there by Professor Stanley B. Ryerson, the editor of the Communist publication Clarté in Montreal. Ryerson was then known under the name of “Comrade E. Roger.” This was the same Ryerson who later became one of the top leaders of the Communist Party in Toronto and whose wife, Edna Ryerson, is a school trustee on the Toronto School Board. Ryerson had just returned from the famed Sorbonne University in France, and Gagnon became one of his many ‘prize’ recruits.

We came out of Valcartier Camp together and were prominent in organizing the Quebec City unemployed from 1935 to 1938. Quebec City newspapers of those years abound in descriptions of our meetings. Those were the days of the ‘Popular Front,’ and Gagnon succeeded in infiltrating the nationalistic separatist movement which centred around the publication La Nation (founded, incidentally, by Paul Bouchard, and not by Gagnon as Leese states in his article).

Gagnon became Secretary-Treasurer of L’Union Nationale Ouvrière (UNO), an unemployed organization controlled by the Separatists in 1936-37. He was also writing in La Nation, and succeeded in creating a Communist cell of four members. And when this secret cell (code name “Politburo”) was exposed by Paul Bouchard, who accidentally found a document that one of the cell members had thoughtlessly forgotten, these four Reds and Gagnon were expelled publicly from La Nation as Communist infiltrators. All of these five were then in turn expelled from the UNO when they tried to ‘take over’ this unemployed organization. All of this is public knowledge and was published in newspapers in Quebec City at that time. Needless to say, the Gagnon group did not dare sue Bouchard for libel because he had the secret document in his possession, in which the conspiratorial activities of the Gagnon group along Communist infiltration lines was clearly outlined. During this time I was learning to speak French and was only a simple member of the UNO, but because I was identified with the Gagnon group I was also ‘expelled’ from the UNO.

“Infiltrate the ‘bourgeois’ press”

After the expulsion of Gagnon and the four other Reds from both La Nation and the UNO unemployed organization, we received the visit of Stanley B. Ryerson, Dave Kashtan and Emery Samuel, three top Commie ‘fonctionnaires.’ Ryerson analyzed the situation arising out of the failure to infiltrate the Separatist organization by the Quebec Communists, and it was then decided that Gagnon would infiltrate the ‘bourgeois’ press. And the next morning he was hired as a ‘reporter’ for Le Journal!

In 1939 when war was declared the Communist Party was outlawed and, following a preconceived plan, all of the Communists went ‘underground.’ However, Gagnon had succeeded so well in infiltrating the ‘bourgeois’ press that he became editor-in-chief of the now merged L’Évènement-Journal and received strict Communist Party orders to “play his role and avoid internment.” Leese conveniently forgets to mention that Gagnon only advocated a pro-war policy the same day the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany—and this in accordance with the acrobatic flip in the ‘party line’ which overnight changed the slogan “imperialist war” to “war of liberation.” During all these years I was in continual contact with Gagnon, either at meetings or through written correspondence when I was a union organizer in the Abitibi district in 1938-39. I knew Gagnon as a hidebound, blinkered Stalinist, a dues-paying member of both the Communist Party and the subsequent Labour Progressive Party which replaced the outlawed C.P. after 1942.

From 1935 to 1940 Gagnon had been involved in so many Red ‘fronts’ that he became a master of intrigue and duplicity. He could be a ‘respectable’ newspaper editor one day, and the next could arrange a secret meeting between Communist leader Tim Buck and gullible sympathizers of the Soviet cause from the ‘bourgeois’ Upper-Town. His many talents equipped him for such diverse tasks as trying to blow up the monument to the Boer War Veterans one night, and the next night blandly speaking about English Literature to a Kiwanis gathering.

But it was during the vital war years of 1942-45 that Gagnon was to surpass himself in Red intrigue and Soviet espionage. He was much too valuable and well-trained for the Communist apparatus to leave in Quebec City. Precisely because his Commie background was unknown to the Montreal public at large (but not unknown to the Provincial Police anti-subversive squad, which conveniently had been ‘disbanded’ by the Godbout Government in 1941) he was ordered to Montreal by Fred Rose and Stanley Ryerson, and before long he had become a darling of the CBC, where the Communists were solidly entrenched during the war years. He publicly appeared at Communist meetings on the same platform as Fred Rose; and, with the help of secret Communists in Ottawa he was soon ‘attached’ to External Affairs, another Red breeding-ground in these years when hundreds of known and secret Communists were infiltrating the civil service.

Also, at that time the Communists had wide influence in Washington under the protective wing of the Alger Hiss-Harry Dexter White groups. With Dr. Raymond Boyer and Frederick Vanderbilt Field as ‘sponsors,’ Gagnon was able to infiltrate again higher.

At this stage, the reader might begin to wonder how in the world I’ve neglected to mention Pierre Elliott-Trudeau and the clique which surrounds him, including Gérard Pelletier, Jean Chrétien, Jean Marchand, and a few others who were elected on the Liberal Party ticket from 1968 on, but previously were identified in Quebec with Socialist and Marxist groups. I shall have a word to say about them shortly. At least these infiltrators were elected. But how about that coterie of assorted revolutionaries, Soviet agents, former NDP Socialists and Unilateral Disarmers who, although they were never elected, have held and still hold influential positions in the upper civil service, in ambassadorial posts abroad and in top positions of the CBC, the CRTC, the National Film Board, CIDA, etc.? People such as Jean-Louis Gagnon, Al Johnson, Graham Spry, Bob Bryce, Jacques Roy, William (“Bill”) Lee, Hazen Size, Alan Gottlieb, Mark Starowicz, Robert Rabinovitch, Ed Clark, Michael Pitfield, John Grierson, Bernard Ostry, Escott Reid, Chester Ronning, and so many others who were able to worm their way into key positions in the Establishment and to keep these positions even when there was a change of government in Ottawa.

Long before the “Three Wise Men” from Quebec (Trudeau, Pelletier and Marchand) took over the federal Liberal Party in a typical Fabian Socialist coup d’etat, the civil service, the CBC, the National Film Board and other Crown agencies had been deeply penetrated by a group of Fabian Socialists, most of them graduates of the London School of Economics.

The most valuable short work on the deadly subversion of the free society by the Fabian Socialists is Eric Butler’s The Fabian Socialist Contribution to the Communist Advance. This 44-page booklet is listed at the back of this booklet. It’s “essential reading” for all who want to be equipped to really defend freedom.

The famous French writer, Julien Benda, created a sensation in the ’30s when he wrote a book which became a classic: La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals). A similar book could be written in the Canadian context, as it has been largely our universities which have produced the leadership of the whole Marxist Conspiracy — both the revolutionary Communist leadership and the elite echelons of the ‘gradualist’ Fabian Socialists.

The Comintern agent O. D. Skelton, to whom we have already referred, had been a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston. Another notorious Comintern agent, Stanley B. Ryerson (alias E. Roger), of the famous early Toronto Ryerson Family, recruited the future leadership of the Quebec Communist apparatus from among his students at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, including Gui Caron, Kent Rowley, Madeleine Parent, Camille Dionne and John Switzman.

However, it was Professor Frank Underhill, tutored by such Fabian masters as Harold Laski and George Bernard Shaw when he was at Balliol College, who later was responsible for hundreds of his pupils being able to infiltrate the civil services of both Ottawa and the provinces. In an article in the Toronto Daily Star of Nov. 27, 1969, referring to the testimonial dinner given old-time Liberal Party advisor Frank Underhill, Peter Newman wrote:

Graham Spry among them — all moving out of public life now and watching their ideology being assaulted on the outside by the radical young, and on the inside by the technocrats.”

Further on, in the same article, we read:

While at Balliol himself, from 1911 to 1914, Underhill joined the Fabian Society and came under the influence of Bernard Shaw…

And then the significant revelation:

Underhill drafted the original Regina Manifesto which launched the CCF.

It’s the old familiar story of the Fabian Socialist who works openly in the Socialist camp and then infiltrates the Liberal Party. Most of those mentioned above were in this category, with Bob Bryce being the grey eminence of the federal civil service and Graham Spry acknowledged as the “father” of the CBC.

“From 1962 to 1968, after a 6-year residency in Canada, Col. Rudolph Albert Herrmann, a Soviet KGB illegal resident, was instructed by Moscow to proceed to the United States. Col. Herrmann’s 25-year career with the KGB began in the 1950’s while serving in the military of a Soviet-bloc country. His initial training in espionage techniques such as secret writing and cipher systems took place in Communist East Germany. More advanced training was received in the Soviet Union. Not long after his arrival in the USA, Col. Herrmann was identified by FBI agents and then decided to co-operate with the FBI.

Through Herrmann’s co-operation, the FBI has achieved significant and sustained counter-intelligence objective and is pursuing additional leads developed from Herrmann’s information. The Herrmann family has been granted asylum in the United States and has been resettled under a new identity.

Herrmann has also provided significant leads on previously unidentified Soviet agents including Hugh George Hambleton, now (1981) a professor at Laval University in Quebec City. Hambleton, whom Herrmann identified as a long-time andtrusted Soviet agent, has recently been interviewed by Canadianauthorities. (Emphasis added)

— Excerpts of correspondence from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to Patrick Walsh, March 3, 1980

Upon becoming acquainted with the above FBI statement, the mass media located Professor Hambleton in Quebec City and he acknowledged that he had been a Soviet spy while working with External Affairs and CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) in Ottawa, as well as for the Canadian government and Crown corporations in France, Israel, Saudi-Arabia, Spain and Latin-America. He also stated he had no fear of being arrested because if he were “a lot of big names in Ottawa are going to go down with me.’*

For several weeks the mass media splashed Professor Hambleton’s declarations on the front pages and on the TV screens. Hambleton gave an interview to the Ottawa Journal in which he boasted of his many “achievements” during the 30 years he admitted working for the Soviet KGB in Ottawa and foreign countries. Repeated attempts by federal MPs to get some kind of confirmation from the federal government failed to even get on the “Order Paper” at question time.

However, on April 15, 1981, the fighting Tory MP for Leeds, Tom Cossitt, did succeed in getting two questions on the Order Paper. Here is the Commons Debates [Hansard] report on Questions 990 and 991, with the usual cover-up reply from the Solicitor-General, Robert Kaplan:

PROFESSOR HAMBLETON OF LAVAL UNIVERSITY

Question No. 991—Mr. Cossitt:

1. To the knowledge of the government, did Professor Hambleton of Laval University, work for the KGB in (a) Canada (b) France (c) Israel (d) Saudi Arabia (e) Spain (f) certain sections of Latin America (g) any other country?

2. To the knowledge of the government, did Professor Hambleton make the statement, that if he was charged and put on trial “a lot of big names in Ottawa are going to go down with me“?

Hon. Bob Kaplan (Solicitor General): The Government of Canada believes that it would not be in the public’s interest to either confirm or deny or provide additional information on this investigation.

Question No. 992—Mr. Cossitt:

1. Did Professor Hambleton of Laval University admit to having contact with a known agent of a foreign power and, if so, was he charged under the Official Secrets Act and, if not, for what reason?

3. What is a complete history of all employment directly or by contract with the government or any Crown corporation by Professor Hambleton, and did he perform certain duties in connection with the Canadian International Development Agency and, if so, what are the details of such duties?

Hon. Bob Kaplan (Solicitor General): The Government of Canada believes that it would not be in the public’s interest to either confirm or deny or provide information on this investigation.

As Toronto journalist, Paul Fromm, stated in the August 1981, issue of the CIS:

“To all his questions he received from Solicitor-General Robert Kaplan the Canadian Cabinet Minister’s equivalent of the Fifth Amendment: ‘The Government of Canada believes that it would not be in the public’s interest to either confirm or deny or provide any additional information.’ Professor Hambleton has never been charged.

“These cumulative revelations well merit Otto Jelinek’s description of them as a “stinking mess.” Jelinek called on Prime Minister Trudeau recently ‘to initiate a full-scale investigation into espionage activities in Canada, both past and present, where they are connected, for the sake of national security.’ Trudeau responded: “Presumably espionage has been going on, is going on, and will go on. If we know of any spies we will get rid of them. If we do not know of any, I fail to see how an investigation by some public body will turn up any names of spies.’

“For the moment the deeply penetrated Canadian civil service, diplomatic corps, and academic community can breath easier. There’ll be no full-scale inquiry. Nobody will be embarrassed. For the moment.”

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau tried to stem the drain of senior civil service talent by easing up on security restrictions for homosexuals.

“Trudeau saw the end of the External Affairs department with so many top people being investigated and seen at orgies, that he opted for keeping them if they accepted medical treatment,” said a former top-level RCMP officer.

“But the Russians never eased up one bit in blackmailing homosexuals in government. Many had families to conceal it from. It’s still a Sodom and Gomorrah in Ottawa.”

The RCMP investigation of the blackmailed ambassadors, helped by the CIA and FBI, delved deeply into the chain in External that had promoted suspect ambassadors, at least four, to sensitive posts.

Part of that investigation was directed at Pearson, a friend of Watkins who had served as external affairs minister before becoming prime minister.

The FBI had 4,000 transcript pages of testimony, interrogation and cross-references from and about Elizabeth Bentley, long-time secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S. Included in the bundle sent to Ottawa was Bentley’s secret testimony before the U.S. Senate Internal Security subcommittee.

She testified that during World War II, Pearson as ambassador to Washington, had fed details of top-secret deliberations among western Allied powers to a Soviet agent, Hazen Size.

Bentley said Pearson knew that Size was a Soviet agent. Size, an architect, came to Ottawa after the war and worked for the National Capital Commission until his retirement. He died in Montreal several years ago.

The U.S. spooks were also unnerved by Pearson’s vigorous defence of his colleague, Herbert Norman, ambassador to Egypt who had jumped to his death in Cairo in 1957.

While Pearson was denouncing in Parliament the senate committee’s “witch-hunt” in identifying Norman as a communist, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower held a CIA dispatch from Cairo.

The message told him that on the night before Norman died, he had dined with a doctor friend and, according to the doctor, Norman said he feared that a royal commission would be called into the U.S. allegations.

If called to testify, Norman said he would be forced to implicate “60 or 70″ definite and possibly up to 400 Canadians and Americans in a Soviet spy network. He said he’d rather kill himself.

The most startling disclosure in the suppressed “Featherbed File” deals with almost similar statements by two former top officials in External Affairs, Herbert Norman and Hugh Hambleton (now of Laval University). In both cases, these exposed Soviet infiltrators expressed concern that if they admitted their own complicity “many others would be involved in top places.” Here is what the August, 1957, CIS issue reported on the Norman Case:

Early this month Willard Edwards, head of the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune Press Service, filed a most significant story relating to the “Norman Case.” Because it was widely suppressed by Canadian press and radio, we are reproducing, in part, the release which appeared in the July 12th Tribune.

“Washington, July 11 — Canadian Ambassador Herbert E. Norman leaped to his death in Cairo last April 4 because he could not face the prospect of an investigation in which he would be forced to involve a large group of American and Canadian officials.

“This is the gist of a highly secret report in the files of Canadian and American intelligence agencies which has deeply disturbed the government*; of both countries.

Norman’s Confession

“Norman’s suicide has remained officially a mystery. Originally, the Canadian government, then led by Lester B. Pearson, secretary of state for external affairs, attacked the senate internal security subcommittee for ‘slanders’ and ‘unsupported insinuations’ regarding the ambassador’s alleged communist background which caused him such mental grief that he ended his life.

“But new evidence from Cairo has furnished an entirely different motive. It came from an agent, given the highest classification for trustworthiness, who reported as follows:

“On the eve of his suicide, Norman had dinner with his personal physician and confessed to him his mental tribulations over the international storm aroused by the senate group’s disclosures.

Would Involve 60 or 70

“‘I fear that St. Laurent is not backing me up in this affair,’ Norman was quoted as saying. ‘I am seriously thinking of suicide. If there is an inquiry and I am forced to testify, I would have to involve 60 or 70 Americans and Canadian officials.’

“Early the next morning, Norman went to the top of the highest building in Cairo and jumped. He left two suicide notes, the major portions of which have been impounded by the Canadian government.”

Who Is Involved?

Willard Edwards, in the closing paragraphs of his story, relates Norman’s activities in the Institute of Pacific Relations, which was found by a Congressional committee to be “an instrument of communist policy, propaganda and intelligence.”

At the present time two of the key figures in the External Affairs Department are Chester Ronning and Escott Reid, Commander William Guy Carr, on page 213 of Red Fog Over America, gives the details of the pro-Communist backgrounds of these officials, both of whom were members of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

Are these key figures, operating at the policy-making level of our government, two of those whom Norman would have had to identify?

Would several figures prominent in the annual Lake Couchiching ‘Conference’, sponsored by the Institute of International Affairs and the CBC, have been identified?

These vital questions cannot be brushed aside just because Mr. Pearson was removed from his ministerial post a few weeks ago. The others involved still hold key posts in Ottawa.

The prevalence of homosexuals in government enabled the Soviet Union’s KGB spy network to score its greatest post-war successes in Ottawa.

—Columnist Bob Reguly, Toronto Sun, March 30, 1981

The publication of Chapman Pincher’s book, Their Trade is Treachery, dealing with the penetration of the Free World’s secret defences by the Soviet KGB secret police, has created concern throughout the Free World. This book was also responsible for the startling revelation that John Watkins, Canada’s ambassador to Moscow for 1954-56, and his successor, David Johnson, were both blackmailed by the KGB through set-up pictures of homosexual encounters.

The RCMP Security Service has likewise disclosed that a third ambassador, his name unrevealed, had also been blackmailed in similar circumstances by the KGB.

Further revelations by investigative reporter Bob Reguly in the Toronto Sun in the spring of 1981, quoted a former top-level RCMP officer to the effect that the Watkins “affair” had unleashed a large-scale clean-out of homosexuals in government as security risks, with the hunt focusing on the External Affairs Department in Ottawa. RCMP sources indicated that they had identified 3,000 homosexuals in middle and senior positions in the civil service and wanted them all weeded out, but didn’t succeed.

Many Canadians were somewhat puzzled in 1967, when the then Justice Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, spawned his Criminal Code amendments which included legalizing homosexuality. Bob Reguly and others have claimed that when he became Prime Minister, Trudeau was instrumental in easing up the security restrictions on homosexuals, especially in External Affairs. It was around this time that the first inkling of a “Featherbed File” became known, and for the next 13 years all attempts by the Opposition MPs and the mass media to have the “Featherbed File” made public was thwarted by the Trudeau regime.

However the on-going security investigation pursuant to the “Gouzenko revelations ” of 1945-46 (which led to the arrest of fifteen top civil servants involved in Soviet espionage) brought out other aspects which have been carefully concealed by successive federal governments over a 60-year period.